and from Alabama — where nine cases have been recorded since last fall — points to the possible involvement of an adenovirus.
In a statement issued late Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is working with Alabama on its investigation into the cases, and is working with other state health departments to see if there are other cases elsewhere.
At this time adenovirus may be the cause for these, but investigators are still learning more — including ruling out the more common causes of hepatitis,” she said.
Karen Landers, district medical officer for the Alabama Department of Public Health, said the cases were found in various parts of the state, and investigations to date have not found links among the children.
“It is not common to see children with severe hepatitis,” Landers, who has been a pediatrician for 45 years, told STAT in an interview.
Genetic sequencing is underway to try to identify if one or multiple types of adenoviruses are implicated.
The newspaper El País reported Wednesday that Spain had detected three cases, all in children between the ages of 2 and 7.
As in the U.K., the children in Alabama were quite sick, said Helena Gutierrez, medical director of the pediatric liver transplant program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers, said the organization knows of the cases in the U.K., but had not been made aware there were similar cases in this country.
But the former appears to be the leading suspect, according to a scientific article on the Scottish cases that was published Thursday in the online journal Eurosurveillance.
Hepatitis — inflammation of the liver — is a condition that can be caused by a number of factors, though often viral infections are the cause.